Wednesday, May 7, 2014

TLF Version 1.016 Released (Finish Him!)

Version 1.016 is now out, and has a huge amount of refinement to solar balance, autoresolve, and combat balance.

The way that races get techs is also a ton more clear, which also should help further clarify the uses of raw resources for players, too. In the past version there was unfortunately a very nasty bug that made the races really unwilling to fight one another aside from their outposts or if you asked them to, or a few other cases like honor responses or whatnot. So that was really skewing things, and hence the earlier release today.

Took quite a while to find that, though, and in the meantime a lot of other things also got improved. In my test observer games since all the stuff has been in, I've seen the Boarines sweep the solar system; the Burlusts do the same; the Evucks and Skylaxians divide it and then the Evucks wipe out the Skylaxians before getting stuck against Peltians with a bunch of manufacturing outposts for 100 years, and so on. It's a lot more diverse, with the Skylaxians not just dominating everything anymore.

The early missions tend to contain spy probes, and in recent versions they were underwhelming as well as mildly glitchy. Those have been really fixed up a ton to be more interesting and work fully properly.

There are also three new kinds of race actions, one of which is actually quite dangerous to you if you are having races in the federation really hate you for a long time -- they'll potentially withdraw from the federation over that, now, so you can't just leave your allies loathing you forever like you previously could. That's a pretty huge shift in terms of the difficulty of the late game from a strategic standpoint, so that should be interesting to see how it plays out. It may be too sharp of a fallout at the moment, but I suppose we'll see.

Obviously I had said that I was going to work on quests "unless something else came up," sigh, and things did. Firstly when I went to work on quests, the broken stuff with spy drones and auto-resolve were staring me in the face. Then there was the fiasco with races not attacking properly, and all the stuff I was doing to improve things in general while I hunted that down. My roster is clear for the rest of the workday, though, so I'm going to focus my remaining time on quests (barring some other bug).

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. I've been promising daily new features, but last week it became clear that there are other things more on your mind. Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that. So, you know what? I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on? Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming. If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like. We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are). Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come either tonight or tomorrow. Enjoy!

This
is a standard update that you can download through the in-game
updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.
To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do
so.